problem solving; competitive programming; winter;

Puzzles: Star Battle

This is going to be a slightly different post than usual. Recently I was asked to construct some diagram puzzles (which are a subgenre of logic puzzles) for a Polish newspaper. Since not all of them are going to get printed I thought that I might as well put them here, so my effort won’t get completely wasted.

A small introduction in case you’ve never seen the diagram puzzles before: Puzzles are generally printed and solved on paper, although it’s fine to solve them in paint or other simple graphics software. Puzzles have only one solution, and it should be possible (and certainly it is with my puzzles) to solve them using so-called logical reasoning, which generally means that the puzzles can be solved without using eraser and/or magic. So it’s like Sudoku (which is an another type of diagram puzzles), but it’s actually fun to solve.

All of the 3 diagrams are Star Battle puzzles. Rules for the lazy: “Put stars into some cells of the diagram, so that every row, column and bold region have exactly two stars. Stars can’t touch other, not even diagonally.” The first two puzzles should be rather easy, but the third one should be a decent challenge for an experienced solver.

3 thoughts on “Puzzles: Star Battle”

Nice puzzles. I’ve never seen Star Battle puzzles before, so it was a bit of a difficulty leap between the first two and the last one (had to resort to guessing the orientation of the middle region to solve it). Very enjoyable though :)